Latent Space Network Models

Patrick O. Perry, NYU Stern School of Business

Most of the code here is taken from examples from the latentnet R
package by the
following authors: Pavel N. Krivitsky, Mark S. Handcock, Susan M. Shortreed,
Jeremy Tantrum, Peter D. Hoff, Li Wang, and Kirk Li.

Preliminaries

Computing environment

We will use the following R packages.

library("latentnet")

To ensure consistent runs, we set the seed before performing any
analysis.

set.seed(0)

Data

We will analyze Sampson's monk network.

data(sampson)

The previous command loads a symmetric network called samplike, with edges
indicating monk affinities for each other:

Latent Position Models

In a latent position model, each node has an associated latent position. Notes
with nearby latent positions are likely to form ties. To fit such a model, we
need to specify the distance metric, and the dimension. In the example below,
we use euclidean distance, with d=2 dimensions.